


The Wake

by ABeckoningCat



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Comfort/Angst, F/M, Gen, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:26:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABeckoningCat/pseuds/ABeckoningCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Months after the events in Manhattan, a tabloid journalist dredges up evidence of Clint's actions while under Loki's influence, and tries to portray him as a monster in the media.  For the first time he hast to face the horrors that he committed, and choke down the responsibility.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"This is Barton."

"Is the TV on?"

It was never a good sign when Natasha Romanoff started off phone calls with a question.

_How quickly can you get to Malaysia?_

_What counteracts aconite poisoning?_

_Do I cut the blue wire or the red?_

Never. good.

He grimaced as he checked traffic, switching the phone to his other ear and making a one-handed turn into the garage.

"I’m in the car, I’m just pulling into the garage, there’s no TV."

"The radio?"

"No, it’s off.  Is that  _Butterfly Kisses_  song on again, because you know I fucking hate that one."

"Don’t turn it on.  Just come straight upstairs."

"Do I want to know why I’m imposing a media blackout on myself?"

"Do you trust me?"

"No, of course not.  You, like, kill people for a living."

“ _Clint._ ”

"Fine, fine.  I’ll be up in a minute, where are you?"

"Banner’s library.  Don’t make any stops."

Clint pulled into an empty spot, cutting the engine, and sat for a minute with that still-pensive grimace and one hand on the keys.

"…y’mean the one without any TVs or radios in it?"

"Just come upstairs."

There were many different reasons for trepidation, and never one to follow the path of greatest resistance, Clint sighed through his nose and reflexively clenched his hands into fists for all the long ride up.  The temptation was strong to stall the elevator at any other floor and get off early, flicking on any one of the Tower’s seemingly innumerable outlets to the outside world.  Strong, but not so strong as the implied promise that he wouldn’t do exactly that.

It was a two minute ride to Banner’s private floor, the elevator lobby diverging neatly into the man’s private, sequestered quarters, and the library Stark had built him to do professional consultations or just unwind from the chaos of a dangerously stressful day.  The door was open, and Natasha gained her feet from one of the leather armchairs as soon as she heard the elevator’s chiming arrival.

“So what happened,” he prompted, and when her eyes passed over him assessingly he grouched, “I didn’t stop and turn on a TV.”

“Just checking.”

“Why the hell is Stark here?”  He paused, mulling, then tossed his chin up in grudging deference. “…hey, Stark.”

“Arrows.”

“I reiterate:  _what happened_.”

Natasha said, “Does the name Kelsey Givens ring any bells?”

His head dropped back with a groan, and after a moment he rocked it deliberately from one side to the other, cracking his neck.

“Who did I supposedly get pregnant this time?”

“It’s not that.”

“Fine, then, who’s my gay lover?  Because if they photoshop me holding hands with Steve, or looking like I’m staring at Stark’s ass one more time—”

Tony came to life, feigning irritation. “What’s wrong with my ass?”

“It’d look better on the opposite side of a vagina,  _spit it out already_ , what’s she saying this time?”

“It’s not what she’s saying,” Natasha answered, flicking a meaningful  _just shut up and let me get through this_  look to Tony as she did.  “It’s what she’s made public.  We’re still not sure how she got her hands on it—”

“—I have a few ideas,” Tony muttered, then held his hands up in peaceable surrender as Natasha tried to slit his throat with the hard cut of her eyes.  She sighed, folding her arms tightly as she strode nearer to the archer.

“We’re still not sure, is the point, but somehow she came into possession of some… images.  Stills and videos.  Just a few so far, but we… think there might be more.  We think she’s got this planned out somehow, she’s holding back to milk it for all its worth—”

“Milk  _what_ ,” he stressed, but the sarcastic edge was gone from his voice, replaced with a burred look of quiet panic.  Stark might not have been able to identify it in the flecked blue of his eyes, but Natasha felt that little hole opening up in the center of him, the grown reflection of a boy who would always be waiting for things to get just a little bit worse.  Her lips pressed together, unhappy.

“The footage from the New Mexico facility.  From Stuttgart.  From the Helicarrier.”

She saw in his expression the awareness of it, the meaning in her words, but he had that look of subtle, frozen dread to his face.  The skin between his brows was a little forest of creases, his lips poised as if to ask a question, but he neither replied nor reacted.  She spoke gently, as if to coax him out with the softest needleprick of pain.

“The things you did when you were under Loki’s influence.”

Clint’s eyes dodged back and forth between them for a second, and he took a single step back, hands splayed open and held parallel to the floor.

“Wait.  What footage?  The New Mexico facility got swallowed up… Fury said Loki’s staff did something to electrical systems, too much interference from the stone for there to be any—”

“He was lying,” Stark said suddenly, frankly, both hands tucking into his pockets.  He duckbilled his lips and shrugged, dismissive.  “You’re surprised that an organization with its footings cemented in lies  _lied_  to you?”  His eyes popped wide, and he gasped in mock horror. “Shock!  Is anyone else shocked?  _I’m_  shocked—”

“Stark,” Natasha sighed, her voice a groaning prayer for silence.

“—you both sort of made a  _career_  out of lying, also, didn’t you—?”

 _“_ _Stark_.”

He snapped a hand free from his pocket, showing them  his palm as he turned his head away.  His body followed a moment later, a hard pace toward the wrap of the window at the room’s opposite side.  Clint stared after him, but for once there was no reflexive anger at his sarcasm.  Sometimes Tony Stark was an asshole just for the sake of being an asshole, and sometimes it was a defensive reaction.  He was learning to tell the difference.

Clint switched his attention back to Natasha, arms thick with muscle where he folded them against his chest.  The gesture looked too much like he was hugging himself for comfort, and she had to look away.

“ _What_  images,  _what_  footage?  What’s out there that I haven’t seen?”

She deliberated, uncomfortable.  And for too long, apparently, because Clint’s voice cracked with stress, ugent.  “ _Nat_ , talk to me here.  What’s out there that I haven’t seen?”

“Everything,” she answered quietly, trailing her attention back to his knees, then his chest, making her way in painful increments back to his eyes.  An assassin’s face with a boy’s eyes, always waiting for the next strike, the next tragedy, the next day without sustenance.  Waiting and waiting, anticipating the worst, just grateful when another day would end without something crumbling on top of him.  “There was a security protocol, a… a dump of security footage to SHIELD’s remote servers in the event of an emergency.  And not just in New Mexico.  Everywhere in between.  Germany, the Helicarrier, the aircrafts Loki commandeered—”

“What, of  _me_ —?”

“Of everything, it’s a… a patchwork of video and audio from different sources, but it tells the story of what happened.  SHIELD tried to keep it under wraps, it was never supposed to get out, they just… amassed it, and wanted to study it to prevent something similar from happening again.”

He stared at her, half-wild, eyes begging, and said again, “… _Of_ _me_.”

“Of you,” she said softly.

“Killing people.  Killing my  _friends_ , other Agents, my  _students_.”

He wasn’t expecting a confirmation, and she didn’t offer one, realizing only as her arms began to ache that she was hugging herself as well, posture tense.  Clint heaved his breath out all at once, releasing the clench of his arms to pass one hand weakly back through his hair as he paced away.

“Jesus.  Jesus Christ, Nat, I need to see it—”

“Clint, no—”

“I need to see what I did—”

“Don’t do this to yourself—”

“ _You can only say that so many times_ ,” he turned on her sharply, voice rough as old asphalt, but his eyes were still aching.  “People are seeing this, I have to see it too.  I have to know what  happened out there—”

“You already know.”

“I know I was forbidden to go to any of the funerals, and they sent me to fucking Pakistan so I wouldn’t try to go anyway.  I know they’re building a memorial out in Rockaway, and Fury’s already told me I shouldn’t pay my respects,  _because people won’t understand_.  But there’s a hell of a lot I don’tknow, Natasha.  There’s a  _hell_  of a lot that nobody tells me, even when I ask, and now — apparently — there’s an entire fucking log of everything that I did, that I was promised didn’t even exist.  How much of what I was told am I even supposed to believe?  How much of what Loki did was actually…”

She saw the instant it hit him, the gasping clench of it in his stomach, the shock to his eyes, and tried to speak before he could say the words out loud.  Stark looked grimly back from the window, and the sight made him turn his head again.

“Clint—”

“Did I—”

“Don’t—”

He started forward, seizing her arms in sudden, chasmic fear, and she felt something inside of her buckling with want to catch his face in her hands.

“Natasha, did I kill him?  Did I kill Phil Coulson—?”

“ _No_ ,”  her voice warped with grief, and she struggled her arms free from his grasp to try and grip him in return.  “No, I  _swear_  to you, this isn’t —  Clint, that wasn’t you—”

And that much, at least, wasn’t a lie.  But the toll of that bellstrike was still vibrating through him.  Because even if his wasn’t the hand that killed Phil Coulson, it was certainly the one that had cleared the way with a marksman’s eye for the line of fire.

“I wanted you to know so that you could avoid it,” she whispered, clutching at his sleeves.

“Don’t,” Tony cut in suddenly, as if slicing through the ether between worlds, inserting himself with a grim, purposeful stride from the window.  Natasha looked at him, too incredulous to muster a rebuff, and just as well.  He wasn’t in a mood to be dismissed.

He looked back and forth between them, spy to spy, as if the expressions on their faces were alien to him, something with which he’d had only trifling experience, and no longer had any time for.

He said firmly, “Show him.  Show it all to him.  Every picture, everything this woman’s going to dig up and regurgitate to the world anyway.”

“This isn’t like ripping off a bandage, Stark,” Natasha gravelled, trying to muster a note of warning.  He met her eyes defiantly.

“No, you’re right, because this isn’t a burn or a bullet wound, or all the things you’re used to, it’s a tumor.  And the more you cover it up and pretend it isn’t there, the worse it’s going to get.”  Humorlessly he switched a look back to Clint, then turned away again, this time moving for the elevator.

“Let him see everything he’s responsible for, or it will eat him from the inside out.  Take it from someone who knows.”


	2. Chapter 2

Tony Stark had only one word of advice for her.

He never hesitated to use it, wielded it both gently and emphatically, but never let himself waver from it, no matter the tricks Natasha used to sway him.

She appealed, and she seduced, and finally she raged, but all he would say was, “Don’t.”

“Do you even know what you’re saying to me?”

“I know perfectly well.  And  _you_  know that I know.  It doesn’t change my answer.”

“You’re handing him a loaded gun.  You’re thumbing the bullet into the chamber and passing it over to him, and playing Russian Roulette with his emotions.”

But Stark shrugged with that affect of indifference, so expertly honed as to be passable as genuine.  If Natasha had not been such a skilled judge of character, good and bad, she would have believed in it, and not seen through its translucence to the concern hidden beneath.

He said, “Remember what he said to you in the detention cell?”

“He said a  _lot_  of things to me in the detention cell.”  She narrowed her eyes.  “All of which were private.”

“Psh.  Technology negates privacy, who do you think you’re talking to?  Let’s pretend that I didn’t actually tap into the Helicarrier’s security archives, and that you shared the whole thing with me on a drunken Girl’s Night In.  I painted your  _hair_ , you braided my  _nails_ —”

“Jesus…God…stop talking…just  _get to it_  already.”

“He said to you, ‘Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?’  And you said to him…”

Natasha eyed his coaxing expression almost hatefully, finally rasping, “I said ‘you know that I do.’”

“Natasha,” Stark said. “I’m asking you, right now… do you know what it’s like to face down the worst of your best intentions?  Do you know what it’s like to look back, and see the  _manipulations_  that you’ve been put through, the hand that’s been wrapped around your heart, willing you to do horrible, inexcusable, unconscionable things?  Things that make your present self, your _aware_  self, the good person that you want to believe you are, deep down… things that make that person want to throw up?  Do you know what it’s like to have to choke that down like a mouthful of bile and broken glass, knowing that no matter the good you do for the rest of your life, you’ll never make up for the lives you’ve taken, the pain you’ve caused, the children you’ve made weep for their Daddies,  and there is nothing —  _nothing_ , no amount of money or good will or blood, sweat and tears — that will  _ever_ repair that?”

She stared, lips pressed, eyes tremulous and sheened, but Stark’s mahogany gaze was immovable.

He leaned toward her.  “ _Me too._ ”

“What do you want from me?”, Natasha whispered.

“Nothing.  Precisely nothing.  I want you to turn around, and for the next few days, forget that he exists.  Pretend he’s on a mission somewhere.  When it’s time, I promise you’ll be the first one that knows.”

And so she did.  Against every impulse, every will, she turned and walked straigh back to the elevator, riding it to her quarters and pretending that the man the world knew as  _Hawkeye_  was anywhere but in residence.

It took five days.  Five dark, ugly days.

From the morning that Kelsey Givens went public, the Tower’s switchboards were lit up like Christmas.  There was no escaping the incoming calls, the requests for statements and interviews.  Tony tried to parlay the attention into press conferences about the upcoming Stark Expo, some new ultra-light armor infused with nanotechnology, but no one was biting.  They didn’t want to talk PR, they wanted to talk bloodshed.

At first the leak was small, a slow bleed of stills and inoffensive soundbites.

Clint with his crystalline blue eyes, looking feverish and sick as he paced purposefully down a Helicarrier corridor.  Clint shoulder-to-shoulder with Loki’s paratroopers, issuing commands.  Natasha nursed on them as she would a strong poison, trying to bolster her immunity to it by tiny, sickening sips.  For a little while, it worked.

On the third day was when the video leaked online of Clint with a pistol, arm extended and far shoulder thrown back in that strangely archer-like shooting stance.  Black SHIELD fatigues, fingerless gloves, his lips hardened with resolved as he pulled the trigger.

On the other end of the gun, the head of Agent Lily Markley.  She was only back from maternity leave for two weeks.  Natasha had gone to her shower.

The major news outlets freeze-framed the footage before he squeezed the trigger.  Sites like Rotten.com and its ilk went further, left nothing to the imagination.

CNN called.  Larry King.  Nancy Grace.  Howard Stern got her cell number somehow and offered two million dollars for a five minute interview.  When she told him to go fuck himself he made a comment about her tits that made it to the air.

Fury begged her to leave it alone.

“Nick,” she appealed in frustration, and he echoed Tony, more pleading than she’d ever heard.

“Natasha.  Don’t.”

Five days, and finally Stark called her over the house intercom.

“Okay, go.”

“Go where?”

“To Disneyland, where do you think.  He’s in the lounge on the common level.  Go now."


	3. Chapter 3

Clint Barton had woken from more than a week of Loki’s mental and physical possession as angry as she’d ever see him.  Angry with the demi-God, angry with himself, even angry with her until she’d reminded him, calmly, that she too had once suffered the puppeting of mind and body.

When the Ugandan boy they’d been carrying through a civil warzone for two days finally died in his arms, just a few miles from the field hospital, he’d stared, and he’d passed a callused hand softly over the child’s eyes, and he’d stood resolutely to make the long trek back to his family.

When a troubled reunion with his brother brought to light that their mother had miscarried a baby sister while taking a beating meant for four-year-old Clint, he’d choked down his whiskey and ground his jaw silently and told Natasha to go get her coat, because it was time to leave.

After a decade with Clint Barton, Natasha was still unprepared for the forward slouch of him on the common room couch, eyes woeful and rheumy with grief, mouth hard and puckered at the corners as he fought a tremulous frown.

The room was dark, battered by the mothwing flutter of light from the screen’s moving images, footage from what appeared to be one of the abandoned tunnels beneath Stuttgart.  His past self stood at soldierly attention, just relaxed enough to be called  _at ease_ , addressing Loki with small, severe nods of his head.  Clarifying statements, a story told in short, hard facts.

Infiltrate here.  Look for this and that.  Get the key card off this one.  Kill that one.

She heard him sniffle raggedly, wiping his nose crudely against the back of one wrist, and only then started forward from the elevator lobby.

“Clint?”

“Busy,” he rasped.

“Yeah.  I see that.”  She made it to the back of the couch, hands on its edge as she forced herself to look at him, even when he wouldn’t look at her.

Why was it so hard to see a man cry?  As many times as she had drawn blood, leveraged innocent lives for information or compliance, none ever stuck with her as strongly as a man brought to tears.  Russian fathers begging the lives of their daughters.  Husbands holding in their arms the fragile bodies of wives they were too tight-lipped to save.  How marveling and terrible their eyes as they searched, trying to fathom the empty vessel that was once something they loved.

Women cried because their hearts were too full; of joy, of pain, of yearning.  Men cried because they could suddenly feel nothing but their own cavernous loss.

Natasha thought grimly,  _And you thought you knew before what it was to be unmade._

“Can I sit?”

“No.”

But she did anyway, rounding the couch and settling a half-cushion’s distance from him, her hands at her knees.  She was still toiling over how to begin, how to put a match to something that was already well ablaze, when he suddenly spoke.

“How much of this have you seen?”

“Not a lot of it.”

“Because you didn’t want to know?”

“I already knew.”  Since the bell had already been rung she let her shoulders slouch, defeated. “I didn’t want to be reminded.”

Clint turned to look at her finally, a stiff twist of his head, and it was an effort not to flinch under the weight of his eyes.  The blue light shimmered them like pools.

He asked with choking care, “…do you hate me?”

She felt her insides fold like a house of cards, a whispering collapse from heart to stomach, and hushed back emphatically, “Clint, no one hates you—”

“Plenty of people hate me,” he argued like a child, and nodded quickly towards the screen before looking back to her.  “These people?  They hate me.”

“Dead people can’t hate.  Isn’t that what you told me?  It’s the only good thing about them.”

“No, but their families sure as hell can, can’t they?  Their mothers?  Wives?  Kids?”  His features tightened up, tremulous and strained, and he croaked, “Jesus Christ, Nat… did you see?   Lily Markley—”

He was gutting her, word by horrible word.  She never wanted to hear his voice like this again.  Never again.

“Clint—”

“She had a little girl… did you know that?  I didn’t see the email until I got back…,” he broke, the whole of him shuddering with a restrained sob.  “I didn’t see it, and I sent her husband a fucking email  _congratulating him_ —”

For an awful moment she was sure she was going to be sick, the feeling welled up and watered in her mouth, and she had to close her eyes for composure.

“Please don’t do this.  Clint.  I can’t do this right now.”

“ _Right now_?  When is a better time, Nat?  Please— _please_ —tell me that.”  Anger was trying to push through, bubbling up through the wounds like ichor, and he turned on the cushion to face her.  “Tell me when the perfect time would have been to show all of this to me—”

“There  _wasn’t_ —”

“—I’d love to know what goddamned occasion Fury was waiting for to pull the curtain off of this.  Would it have been a year—?  Two years?”

“—Clint, nobody had a  _plan_ , they just… I don’t  _know_  what they were thinking, when have I  _ever_  known—”

“Was I supposed to go along, not knowing that I broke the neck of the maintenance guy that used to show me pictures of his grandkids, because he stepped out into the corridor at the wrong time?”

She stopped, realizing all at once the futility of an argument.  Arguments could be won or settled.  This was nothing but a slice across a cyst, and his anger with her the poison trying to surge out.  That didn’t stop him from waiting for a rebuttal, however, of holding his breath and burning his eyes into her, begging her to defend him, or reveal the hot venom of all her resentment.

When it didn’t come, when she only stared and blinked and let him simmer, it made it all the worse.

“Tell me you hate me.   _Say it_.  Say it, because I know you have to.  Of all this _bullshit_ , the worst of this isn’t the things that I did, because I can spend the rest of my fucking life  _trying_  — never  _succeeding_ , but at least  _trying_  — to make good on it in some way.  But I will  _never_ , in my  _life_ , undo what I did to you, will I?”

He was waiting for her facade to crack, her eyes to burn with all the hatred she’d been incubating all these long months, but she wasn’t moving.

He roared, “ _Say it!_ ”

“I won’t, because it isn’t true.”

“You fucking  _know_ it is, and I want to  _hear it_.  I want it in front of me like these pictures, these videos.  I want it to be real to me, how much you hate me…” he started again, opened his mouth with the revulsion of his own words, then choked out, “How I destroyed the one good thing I had.  How I fucked up even that, hurt my  _best friend_ —”

But he’d gotten to the last of it, the final link of the chain, and the effort of speaking the words came like the yank of a plug from a dyke.  He crumpled forward, collapsed onto the fold of his arms  across her knees, and Natasha went numb for the shock of seeing him break apart.  This man, who held dying children and solemnly closed their eyes, who accepted with silent stoicism the loss of an unborn sister, who shook himself from the clutches of the God of Lies with his hands closed into fists.

It wasn’t merely the crying that undid her but the breathless heaving as he wept, the ragged shards of his voice, Clint Barton’s voice, both broken and familiar.

Natasha’s hands trembled open at his back, steady at each fever-hot shoulder, and slowly she folded herself over him.  Her arms bound about his head, her cheek pressed to his crown, and she endured through her own silent misery the shuddering of his breath and the burn of tears soaking through to her skin.

There was no  _Don’t._   She’d heard it too many times already, and knew it for the careless little switchblade of a word that it was.  She didn’t try to stop him, or tell him that it would be fine, because how could it ever?  Even if every soul who felt the vibrations of this terrible spiderweb found the grace to forgive him, it would still, always, fester inside him.  Like broken children and surrogate victims never given a chance to live, it was another deep furrow in his heart.

The grief may not have left him but the energy eventually did, and slowly Natasha sat back, passing her palms in a gentle massage across his bent back.  Assassins with red in their ledgers and confirmed kill counts did not get the luxury of a  _there, there_ , but they could still lean on one another in their condemnation.

Natasha let him come to it in his own time.  Even after his breathing had returned to normal he stayed down in her lap, his cheek pressed to her thigh, though she couldn’t see whether his eyes were opened or closed.  Every so often there was a sniffle, a pass of one hand at his nose or his lashes, and then he’d let it fall open at her knee again, thick fingertips at rest.

“When was the last time you ate?”, she asked, using both hands to comb his hair back, short and deceptively soft for a man composed of so many rough edges.

“Dunno.  Yesterday.  Maybe.”

“You should eat.”

“Not hungry.”

“It wasn’t a question.”  She bent over him again, holding his head in her hands as she kissed into his hair, then give it a final, gentle brush.  “Come on.”

“…Nat…”

“Shut up.  I listened to you fall apart like a big blubbery girl, and now you’re going to listen to  _me_  and do what I tell you.”  Even before she could prompt him she heard him snort with grim laughter, and tugged at his earlobe.  “Understood?”

He sat back, the movement burdensome, like a tree being felled in reverse.  It was a mirthless smile that he wore, but it was a start.

“Yeah, understood.”

Natasha let him recover with the roughing of his palms to his face, extracting herself from the couch and turning so that he need not be confronted with the wet blot of tears on her pants.  She did give a last look around, however, nodding toward the mess of disheveled photos and paperwork.

“What about all this?  What do you think you’ll do?”

“Don’t know,” he said, standing.  “I can only think about one thing at a time right now, and you’ve already picked food.”

“Stark thinks you should hold a press conference.”

“Stark thinks he should manufacture a high-end sex doll in his own likeness.  He’s not a guy I go to for advice.”

“He  _is_  kind of a billionaire, is all I’m saying.  And he’s got that suit.”

Clint sighed, blinking slowly, then moved his head in a tired nod.

“Yeah, maybe.  Food first though, Okay?”

“Okay.”

They rounded to opposite sides of the couch, converging at its back and then moving in synch towards the elevator.  Natasha slid an arm around his waist, relaxing under the heavy drape of his arm as he slung it across her shoulders.

It wasn’t until they were in the elevator, trapped in that universally awkward cocoon of silence, before he spoke again.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me, you know.  I wouldn’t let it affect the partnership.  I’d give you whatever space you’d need.  I’d understand.”

“I know,” she said, and like him kept her eyes fixed on the digital display as the floors counted down.  “But I don’t hate you.”

“ _I’d_  hate me.”

“You’d make a terrible Natasha Romanoff, so stop trying.  I don’t hate you.  I love you too much to ever hate you.”

He uttered another soft, wry snort, lowering his eyes.

“…the worst big brother you never had, hn?”

“Please,” she reached up, steadying his hand where it draped her shoulder.  “Even the Russians wouldn’t let me do to a brother what I’d do to you.”

She felt the swift turn of his head, brows raised high as the elevator chimed to the ground floor.


End file.
